Photoreal Textures Paul Fedor

The ESSENCE journey: Starting in a photo studio in Prague in the Czech Republic, our model Monika was captured by the crew at 3D.SK from every angle in preparation for transformation into a photo-real digital character. From there, Hong Suck Suh in California created the 3D model based on Monika's features and passed the model along to Paul Fedor (also in California) who combined the photographs and 3D model to texture Monika—as a beautiful woman, as an aging woman, and finally as an injured and disfigured woman. In the meantime, Steven Stahlberg in Malaysia created the eyes for Monika. The next step was where things got hairy. Creating realistic, shoulder-length, hair is one of the most difficult CG challenges.

There are many variables that affect whether hair looks real, from the styling, to thickness, and the way light behaves when reflecting through hair It would be no exaggeration to say that our attempts at hair took as long as the rest of the process of creating digital Monika. Due to its complexity, we will cover how to create hair in ESSENCE: Effects—Fur, Hair, and Clothing. For the hair you see on the cover, we have gone with the compositing of Monika's hair from the original photo shoot While this was happening. Mark Snoswell in Adelaide began perfecting his DirectX shaders to generate and place textures automatically on the model geometry Finally. Matt Hartle in California brought together the everyone's assets for the final renders.